Found out my 'quick fix' for a slow website was making it worse

I was sure my site's images were the problem, so I used a free plugin to compress them all. My page speed score dropped from 65 to 40. A developer I hired last week ran a test and showed me the plugin was adding over 2 seconds of load time with bad code. I had to manually remove it and re-upload the original images. Has anyone else had a plugin backfire this badly on their site?

3 comments

3 Comments

kelly.parker2mo ago

Two seconds sounds like a lot, but was the site actually broken for users?

robert_craig3d ago

Kelly mentioned the speed test didn't actually catch the lag when it happened, which is a whole other problem. The real question is whether those two seconds hit during a checkout flow or just a random page load. If someone tried to pay and got stuck for two seconds, that's a lost sale right there. Most people will bail if the payment screen hangs that long. But if the lag only showed up on a blog post or something, nobody probably noticed. Did you check which pages had the slow times?

jennifer5162mo ago

Yeah @kelly.parker, broken is a strong word, but two seconds of lag definitely makes a site feel unusable.